Grégoire Ménuel, aka Omega, XSF member, has presented an introduction to XMPP at the event “Les Jeudis du Libre” (“the thursdays of free software”) in Lyon (France). It took place on the 5th of february, for the french LUG ALDIL (Association Lyonnaise pour le Développement de l’Informatique Libre). His slides are available in PDF format (720 Ko, 24 pages).

Synapse Instant Messenger is an attractive, featureful XMPP client by Eric Butler. It is still alpha software, written in C# for Mono for Linux, and released under the GPLv3 license.

UDDI over IO-DATA (over XMPP)

IO-DATA is a protocol extension on top of the XMPP that enables machine-to-machine communication. UDDI OASIS Standard (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) defines a universal method for enterprises to dynamically discover and invoke Web services. The Taverna project has implemented XMPP-based web/cloud services using these technologies.

More web services with IO-DATA

Developer Tuomas Koski has been experimenting with more uses of IO-DATA for web services at his site lobstermonster.org. The folks on the WS-XMPP discussion list were quite impressed with some of his applications, described here and here.

Personalised Track Notifications over XMPP

BBC Radio Labs has released the bot xmpp:radio1@hug.hellomatty.com, which will ping a user when one of the BBC music stations is playing a tune by an artist the user likes. The user simply has to send the message lastfm lastfmusername.

Jabiru: XMPP client for Android

Jabiru is free jabber client for Google Android platform, released in version 1.0 in March, and constantly updated since.

Concordance: Python 3 framework

Concordance is an XMPP service framework for Python 3.0 (still alpha but under heavy development).

TOXTOX

TOXTOX is an innovative web browser for your television, with built-in XMPP support for “social browsing”.

Alfonso Castro, director of interoperability strategy at Microsoft, announced at Solutions Linux 2009 that Live Communication Server, Microsoft’s presence and instant messaging product, will have an XMPP gateway in the future.

Live Baseball Chat

Fans of both XMPP and American baseball were happy to learn that livebaseballchat.com is a new XMPP-based service for real-time chat about baseball games as they happen.

Another area of focus right now is improved reliability and traffic optimization for mobile applications of XMPP. There are two technologies being developed to address these issues: stream management (which provides acks and reliable delivery of XMPP stanzas) and roster versioning (which removes the need to download the complete XMPP roster each time a client logs in). The XMPP developer community appears to have consensus on these improvements, so look for them to be implemented and deployed in the relatively near future.

In addition, members of the XMPP developer community held a successful “Birds of a Feather” session at the most recent meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force as a means of jump-starting work to finalize the improvements to the XMPP RFCs, which define the very core of XMPP. If an XMPP Working Group is approved, it will also work on some security enhancements to XMPP as well as adjustments to server-to-server communication for increased scalability. We will be reporting on this work more fully in the coming months.

Conclusion

2009 continues to be a very busy year for XMPP development, implementation, and deployment. So busy that it is difficult to find people who can report on everything that is happening! However, we will endeavor to publish “XMPP Roundup #9″ before too much more time goes by.

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What is the XSF?

The XMPP Standards Foundation is an independent, nonprofit standards development organization whose primary mission is to define open protocols for presence, instant messaging, and real-time communication and collaboration on top of the IETF’s Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP).